Love-and-Death                                                            Page 11

The "flower" of 'The City Asleep" and "Dark Gift" is a symbol of all life held

in the hand of death:

The blind, the upward hand

clenches its bud.

What message does death send

from the grave where he lies?

Open, green hand, and give

the dark gift you hold. ("Dark Gift")

The gift from the "green hand" of death is "wild mysterious gold/ ... act of

passionate love". Love and death are entwined: "closely bound/ in nothings

net", out of which the flower of life grows.

This "flower" appears in "Night" (C.P. p.49) as a "great tree" around and in

which the symbols of darkness, earth, love and death are gathered:

Standing here in the night

we are turned to a great tree,

every leaf a star, its root eternity.

The poem is structured in such a way that the tree shows in itself the tension,

the balance and the coexistence of love and death.  There is a double

movement: upward, "every leaf a star", and downward, "its root eternity". It is

unusual for a symbol of eternity to be seen as something that goes

"downwards", like a root in the soil. This surprising movement suggests a new

way of looking at transcendence and immanence, a way of disrupting the usual

transcendence/immanence distinction: while transcendence is usually seen as

"out there" somewhere and immanence is seen as somewhere "within", the

poem brings both together in the tree, in leaf and stem and root.